by Hondo Jinx
“Which is good,” he added with a crazy grin, “because I’m all out of enchanted missiles.”
Enchanted missiles? Dan thought. Those were enchanted missiles?
As a barbarian, he loathed magic, but as a former T&T player, he understood that enchanted missile was a pretty weak spell, unless it was cast by a high-level wizard.
Zuggy screeched anxiously, bouncing up and down on the wizard’s shoulders and pointing down the path.
Zeke started walking in that direction, saying, “My simian companion is clearly ready to make like a shepherd and blow this hotdog stand.”
The Noobs followed after the bizarre wizard and his anxious monkey, Dan wondering just what level Zeke would need to be to cast enchanted missiles that powerful.
48
Team vs. Team
At last, they reached the end of the forest, which terminated at the base of a sheer cliff of black stone that rose up and up and out of sight. The path led to a metal door set in the cliff wall.
Finding no traps, they opened the door and found themselves staring into a large circular room, perhaps one hundred feet across and lit with torches. Along the circular walls, spaced evenly, were three other doors, identical in every way to the one they now held open.
Low stalagmites covered the most of the floor, looking more like melted wax than stone. Overhead, their mirror image, a forest of pointed stalactites, covered the ceiling.
“What do you make of the numbers?” Holly said, pointing to the numbered placards hanging over the doors.
“We’re looking out of Door Three,” Nadia said. “Door three for team three?”
“Could be,” Holly said. “Maybe this is the junction point, where all three teams enter the main dungeon.”
“If so,” Dan said, pointing straight across the room at Door One, which stood slightly ajar, “the Sell-Swords already came through here.”
“They must’ve gone that way,” Nadia said, pointing to Door Four, which also stood partially open.
“Makes sense,” Holly said. “If teams one, two, and three all enter the junction through numbered doors, that leaves only number four.”
“Like a cattle chute,” Nadia said.
Dan nodded. Things were about to get a lot more dangerous.
Could the Sell-Swords be waiting right behind that door to ambush them?
Of course they could.
But would they do that? Or would they race ahead, running toward the treasure?
Hopefully the latter, and hopefully the Sell-Swords carved a path all the way to the Chest of Champions, killed one of the knights mentioned in the goblin forehead tattoo poem, and softened up the other knight before getting wiped out.
Was this a likely scenario?
No, but a barbarian could dream.
“Let’s go,” he said, stepping into the circular room. “Maybe we can get ahead of Alpha Alpha Alpha.”
For as much as he would enjoy ambushing Grady and his asshat pals, Dan would enjoy winning 50,000 gold pieces a lot more.
Zeke tapped Dan’s shoulder and pointed to the smooth ground near the wall. “I would suggest that we all stay close to the wall on our brief and hopefully uneventful sojourn to Door Number Four.”
Dan shrugged. The old guy was insane but also clearly more experienced than Dan had assumed. So he stuck to the wall, reached Door Four, and cracked it open to peer inside.
He relaxed. “The hallway is clear. And it slopes downward!”
Then something banged behind him, the room filled with shouting, and his shoulder jerked hard as if punched. Looking down, he saw the business end of an arrow sticking six inches out of the front of his shoulder, the head dripping blood.
His blood.
He’d been shot.
He could feel the shaft in his shoulder.
Then everything was screaming and chaos.
Arrows zoomed past, shattering against the wall. Misfires clatter-chattered, ricocheting off stalagmites.
Alpha Alpha Alpha roared insults, unloading on them with long bows.
Holly returned fire, nailing Grady center mass, but the arrow shattered on his magical breastplate.
Grady yipped his maddening hyena laughter and pointed at Holly. “You’ll pay for that, blondie!” Then, shifting his yellow eyes to Dan, he grinned. “Here we come, Danielle!”
Dan flipped him the bird and held the door for his teammates.
Nadia zipped under Dan’s arm and into the hallway.
An arrow grazed Dan, slicing a line of fire across one ass cheek.
The gnolls advanced, crouching low and using the stalagmites as cover. All of them yipped their crazy, keening laughter as they hustled forward.
Holly dipped under Dan’s arm and followed after Nadia.
“Come on, Zeke!” Dan called, waving toward the door. But that’s when he realized that the old man, whom he had assumed was just standing there being weird, had been deflecting spells.
As Dan watched, the AAA wizard popped up and launched a bolt of energy straight at him.
Dan froze in terror, watching the crackling projectile streak toward him.
At the last second, the deadly energy angled sharply and bounced away, as if it had hit an invisible shield.
“Better luck next time, sonny!” Zeke cackled and scooted past Dan, Zuggy shrieking from inside his poncho. “Have fun with the drop rocks!”
Dan lunged through the door, turned to pull it shut, and saw a stalactite detach from the ceiling and drop.
The heavy stone slammed into a gnoll. The point punched into the hyena-man’s neck between the back of his helmet and the top of his armor, skewering him through the middle.
Dan slammed the door shut.
Nadia slid in beside him and hammered iron spikes into the edges of the door, jamming it. “That ought to buy us some time.”
Dan nodded toward the arrow still sticking through his shoulder. Feeling the shaft parting the flesh within his muscle was as unnerving as it was painful.
“Snap this, would you?” he asked Nadia. He couldn’t pull the barbed head back through the wound, and he sure as Hades didn’t want to drag the feathers through there, either.
“All right,” Nadia said, grabbing the shaft. “This is going to hurt.”
He nodded. “Do it.”
Nadia held the shaft close to his shoulder and snapped it with her other hand.
She was right. It did hurt.
Dan growled as he pulled the arrow out the front.
Then they hurried after Holly and Zeke, who were just disappearing around a bend in the passageway, heading ever down, down, down.
49
Way, Way Down
Someone–presumably the Sell-Swords–had obviously come this way before them.
Even in the funhouse illumination provided by torches held in jogging hands, Dan detected the signs of the mercenaries’ passage: boot prints in the grit, an already triggered trap, which left a pendulum scythe dangling in the middle of the corridor, and commencing after that, a blood trail.
The blood looked fresh.
Yes, the Sell-Swords were in the lead, but the Noobs were close on their heels.
Behind them, a loud boom echoed through the twisting passage.
Alpha Alpha Alpha had breached the door.
That’s okay, Dan thought. We have at least a quarter of a mile on them.
But the gnolls were tall and athletic, and their magical armor wouldn’t weigh them down. With every leaping stride, the hyena-men would eat up the distance, gaining on the Noobs.
Seeing a wide-open door ahead, the Noobs paused.
“Why leave it open?” Nadia asked. “Why not close and jam it to slow us down?”
“Maybe it’s a trap,” Dan said, remembering Broadus’s warning. “An ambush.”
“Or maybe they’re just hurrying,” Holly said, “making the most of their lead.”
Behind them, the yipping laughter of the gnolls grew closer.
“I’m going
in,” Dan said, and charged into the room.
Passing through the open door, he gritted his teeth, expecting an attack, but none came.
The room was small, with three exits. An open passage carried on straight ahead. Another led to a set of stairs that went up. The final exit yawned at the center of the room. Within, a ladder disappeared into a dark shaft.
“Keep going down,” Holly said.
Dan nodded. “Nadia,” he said, “spike that door shut. We don’t want the frat boys dropping flasks of burning oil down on us.”
Zeke’s light spell had expired, and everyone needed both hands to climb, so the descent would be made in complete darkness.
Dan dropped his torch into the shaft. The flaming torch fluttered, banging back and forth off the tight walls of the shaft, falling thirty feet before it extinguished. After that, Dan could hear the thing clattering far below, still falling.
Dan lowered himself down the ladder, one rung after another, his sweaty hands slippery on the metal rungs.
The shaft narrowed around him. His backpack scuffed along, dragging against the stone. From time to time, his elbows banged into the side of the shaft.
If the space grew any tighter, he’d be jammed in place and would have to cut loose his gear.
His barbarian soul yearned for open air, snowy mountain peaks, raging rivers flanked in ferns, open fields rich with game, and great forests of old timber tumbled with mossy stones.
This was not natural. He could feel the stone pressing in around him, growing narrower with each passing moment, tightening around him like a squeezing fist, threatening to squeeze him to a stop here in the heart of the earth, a mile from air and light and life.
Then his pack dragged, catching, and both shoulders knocked into the walls of the shaft.
“Wait,” he cried, but it was too late.
Pain exploded in his fingers as Holly’s boot crushed down on that hand.
She lurched to a stop above him, then cried out, and for several seconds, the shaft echoed with thumps, cries of pain, shouted curses, and the screeching of an agitated capuchin monkey.
Dan strained and twisted and managed to dislodge himself without having to cut loose the pack. Then he was moving down the ladder again, rung after rung.
He hated this. Hated the feeling of the walls pressing around him. Hated the feeling of so much soil and stone overhead, sealing him away from the living world like a mile-thick coffin lid.
But most of all, he hated feeling so helpless.
Any second now, the gnolls could reach the shaft and start dropping rocks, knives, or flaming oil down on them.
Likewise, the Sell-Swords could be waiting down below, poised to kill the Noobs as soon as they reached the bottom of the ladder. It would be a perfect pinch point murder hole.
But then the shaft opened up and the ladder ended, and Dan dropped to the floor of a large room lit with flickering candlelight. The candles burned upon a heavy wooden table that stood against one wall.
Candlelight glittered over the piles and piles of shining treasure.
Tearing his eyes from this fortune, he helped the other Noobs drop from the ladder.
Stretched on the floor beside the table was further proof of the Sell-Swords’ passage: the remains of what had been a very, very large man stitched in zippers of blue scar tissue. No amount of stitches would put the giant back together now, however. His massive head lay several feet from the rest of him, smashed like a rotten pumpkin.
“Well,” Holly said, pointing at the dead hulk after Dan had helped her down from the ladder, “I guess that following the Sell-Swords does have some advantages.”
“Flesh golem,” Zeke said, examining the corpse.
“I hear the gnolls,” Nadia said, looking up at the dark shaft. “What do we do? Hurry after the Sell-Swords or kill these bastards as they come out of the shaft?”
Dan was tired of running, tired of worrying about Alpha Alpha Alpha, tired of Grady. “Let’s waste the gnolls.”
“I say we keep moving,” Holly disagreed. “I want to win this thing, and we have to hurry if we’re going to catch the Sell-Swords.”
“This flesh golem was very nicely crafted,” Zeke said, oblivious to the debate.
“Good point, Holly,” Nadia said. “Let’s win this thing.”
“All right,” Dan said, disappointed, and stepped to the table, reaching for a beautiful golden necklace. There was such a thing as hurrying too fast. The Sell-Swords hadn’t even bothered to scoop the loot. “In case we don’t win,” he said, “I’m going to snag a few months’ rent before we split.”
“No!” Nadia shouted. “Watch out for traps!”
But even as she shouted her warning, Dan’s hand closed around the golden necklace.
Then it was too late.
Dan held the necklace, but the table rushed up and away, taking the walls and ceiling with it.
What the Hades? How could the table, the whole room be flying up and away?
Around him, the Noobs screamed.
Dan realized that the room wasn’t rocketing up and away. The floor had disappeared. Now he and the Noobs were falling, dropping into the earth!
He slammed into something but kept moving, sliding on his back along what felt like a steep ramp. His teammates hollered in the darkness around him as they slid faster and faster, tunneling through the earth, whipping along what felt like one of those colossal water park slides.
But Dan feared that if they were hurtling toward water, it would be filled with piranhas or crocodiles.
They whipped around a corner, dropped down an even sharper incline, rushed over a hump that pitched them into the air for several seconds, making Dan’s stomach lurch before they crashed down again. They slid into a wide turn that went on and on, tightening, looping the Noobs in a sickening corkscrew as they spiraled deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the world.
Then the ramp disappeared, and an explosion of white light blinded them as they tumbled into open air, screaming as they fell.
50
High in the Sky
They landed without so much as a grunt upon a soft cushion of billowing white vapor, which stretched away in a bright and swirling plain. Overhead and to all sides, the plain was surrounded by the bright blue of a perfect October sky.
Looking around, Dan realized that the surrounding blue didn’t just look like the sky.
It was the sky.
Through some cursed sorcery, the ramp had dumped them out of a magical hole onto a cloud high in the sky.
Crawling to the edge of the cloud, he looked down and felt a rush of vertigo. Miles below them sprawled what, from this height, looked like a miniature replica of State College. His eyes went to the corner of the town and focused on the tiny oval that he realized was Beaver Stadium.
The Noobs stood, uninjured, and launched into rapid-fire questions.
How had they gotten here?
How were they able to walk on the cloud?
Why wasn’t it cold and windy?
How could they breathe up here? Wasn’t oxygen sparse at this height?
Finally, Zeke answered all of their questions with one word: “Magic.”
“Meanwhile, the dungeon is down there, a mile below the surface,” Dan said. “We’re screwed!”
“Not necessarily,” Holly said. “Keep going down till you reach the sky. That’s what the riddle said, and we’ve done it. We’ve reached the sky.”
Dan nodded. “What now?”
“Look,” Nadia said, pointing across the cloud. “Some kind of structure.”
In the distance, vapor stirred, revealing a mound at the center of the cloud. Atop the mound stood a huge white pavilion straight out of ancient Greece. Dan saw broad steps, tall columns, and a triangular mantle, all of which looked to be carved from white marble.
“Let’s go,” he said, and started marching in that direction.
Beneath their feet, the cloudstuff bent but held. It was like crossing a mas
sive white trampoline.
Reaching the structure, they climbed the steps, which were indeed carved of stone.
They stepped onto an open patio tiled in marble and hedged in a rectangle of huge columns. At the center of the pavilion, the biggest man Dan had ever seen sat behind a massive table covered in huge chess pieces.
The man stood.
He’s twenty feet tall, Dan thought, completely awestruck.
The giant’s skin was robin’s egg blue. He had a full head of silvery white hair and a long silver beard. His flowing white toga exposed his muscular shoulders and arms as thick as tree trunks.
We don’t stand a chance, Dan thought. We could never beat him.
The giant’s sky blue eyes sparkled down at them, and a bright smile split his silvery beard.
“Greetings, Noobs,” the giant thundered. “I am Nimbus.”
Nimbus returned to his seat and gestured across the table at a tall chair against which leaned a human-sized ladder. “A friendly game of chess?”
Nadia grimaced. “There is no such thing as a friendly game of chess.”
“What are the stakes?” Dan asked.
“If you win,” Nimbus said, “I return you immediately to the dungeon… along with a detailed map that includes every chamber, challenge, trap, and shortcut. There are a lot of shortcuts.”
The Noobs exchanged excited glances. That sort of map would almost guarantee victory.
“What if we lose?” Holly asked.
“If you lose,” Nimbus said, “I grind your bones to make my bread.” He snickered. “No… I’m serious. I make a killer banana bone bread. It was my grandmother’s recipe, but if I may be so bold, I think I’ve taken it a step further. Trust me. It’s to die for.”
Dan scowled at their massive host. Wasn’t threatening to kill, mutilate, and devour them enough? Did the giant really have to throw in painfully lame puns like some third-rate fantasy writer?
“What if we refuse to play?” Nadia asked.
“Good question,” the giant said. “If you refuse to play, I also return you to the dungeon. No map, though, I’m afraid. You will reappear where you left off, in the treasure room at the middle of the dungeon. And yes, there would be a floor under your feet again.”